Motor vehicle design includes a range of ornamentation, badges, emblems, vents, moldings and other articles which are integrated with body components of the vehicle.
Articles in the form of badges, emblems, and the like are used in the automotive arts to provide identification (i.e., model and make monikers) and/or ornamentation, which are placed on the anterior (externally visible side) of body components of the vehicle. It is known in the art to provide badges and emblems with not only a fixed attachment, but a pivoting attachment, wherein the pivoting occurs parallel to the local plane of the body component. For example, FIGS. 1A and 1B depict a pivotally mounted badge/emblem which was used in the 1982 Chrysler New Yorker (motor vehicle product of former Chrysler Corporation, now DaimlerChrysler of Auburn Hills, Mich.). As shown at FIG. 1A, the badge/emblem 10 is pivotally mounted on a pivot 12 on the rear trunk lid 14. When the badge/emblem 10 is laterally pivoted along arrow A (by “lateral” is meant parallel to the local plane P of the trunk lid 14), as shown at FIG. 1B, revealed is a feature of the motor vehicle in the form of the trunk lock release key-way 16.
It is also known in the automotive art to utilize transversely pivoting covers for providing selective access to features of the motor vehicle such as a fuel filler cap and charge jack (as in the General Motors Corporation of Detroit, Mich. model EV1 of 1998), and it is further known to associate a motor vehicle charge jack with an emblem of the motor vehicle.
In the prior art, articles are attached, whether in a fixed relation or a pivoting relation, exclusively to one or the other of a fixed or movable body component. Even though styling technique has become ever more developed and creative, one aspect of body component design that has remained beyond the skill of designers is how to mount a single piece, rigid article astride (i.e., in straddling, spanning or bridging relation) with respect to both a fixed body component and a movable body component, wherein the article is disposed across the cut-line therebetween. Such an article mounting has heretofor been an impossibility because if a rigid article was to somehow be mounted astride both fixed and movable body components across the cut-line therebetween, such a disposed article would damagingly contact the movable body component and interfere with the relative movement of the movable body component with respect to the fixed body component. The only avenue stylists have in this regard is to simulate installation of an article astride fixed and movable body components by providing a simulated article composed of two separated article pieces: one article piece being affixed to the fixed body component and another article piece being affixed to the movable body component, each article piece being juxtaposed the cut-line such that a separation between the article pieces is located superposed the cut-line between the fixed and movable body components.
Accordingly, what remains needed in the art is to somehow provide an apparatus for mounting an article simultaneously astride both fixed and movable body components which does not interfere with relative movements therebetween.